Out of Character: A Project by Studio MUTT

15-16 & 19-23 September 2018

Sir John Soane's Museum

Sir John Soane’s house, museum and library at No.13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields has been a public museum since the early nineteenth century. It’s an intimate, atmospheric place, designed by Soane himself, and filled with his exceptional collection of famous artworks, sculptures, furniture and artefacts.

On his appointment as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in 1806, Soane (1753-1837) began to arrange his books, classical antiquities, casts and models so that students of architecture might benefit from access to them. In 1833 he negotiated an Act of Parliament to preserve the house and collection after his death for the benefit of ‘amateurs and students’ in architecture, painting and sculpture.

Today Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of the country’s most unusual and significant museums with a continuing and developing commitment to education and creative inspiration.

Discover architectural ‘characters’ inhabiting Sir John Soane’s Museum in a new project by Studio MUTT. Explore the Museum, encountering architectural installations that interact with the Museum's spaces through ornament, colour and form.

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Discover architectural ‘characters’ inhabiting Sir John Soane’s Museum in a new project by MUTT for London Design Festival 2018.

In 1812, John Soane wrote Crude Hints towards an History of my House, a strange and perplexing text in which he imagined his home as a ruin centuries in the future, inspected by visitors who speculate on its origins and function.

In particular Soane suggested that visitors might infer the museum to have been inhabited by four characters: a Lawyer, a Monk, a Magician and an Architect.

Over 200 years later, these characters have been brought to life by MUTT as architectural compositions of ornament, colour and form. The four characters have then been installed as ‘inhabitants’ in different locations in the Museum.

Colourful, rich in decoration and drawing from the wealth of source material in the Museum and Soane’s work, each character communicates with the space it inhabits.

Where modernist architecture sees ornament, colour and character as superfluous elements of architectural design, with this project MUTT reveal how they can communicate and give life to buildings of all scales.

About MUTT
MUTT is an architecture studio founded by Graham Burn, James Crawford and Alexander Turner, with roots in London and Liverpool.

The underlying mission of the studio is to create characterful projects which are unique, specific and joyful. They work at all scales, from a teacup to a tower, to make everyday life better.

MUTT believes in engaging with the world as it exists and rejecting the concept of radical newness, instead adopting referencing and sampling as a solution to contemporary issues. They draw inspiration and ideas from urban, historical and social analysis to create a backdrop, not a background, to everyday life.

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